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Photo by Matt Eich

Understanding Charlottesville

August 25, 2017

Following the deadly white supremacist rally on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, we asked three writers to share their thoughts on the causes and consequences of that weekend and take a closer look at its impact on the local community, the culture of the University of Virginia, and the larger, fraught narrative of race in America.

The Future of Industrial Man

This war is being fought over the structure of industrial society—its basic principles, its purposes, and its institutions. It has one issue, only one: the social and political order of the entirely new physical reality Western man has built up as his habitat since James Watt invented the steam engine almost two hundred years ago.

Nazi Literature in the Americas

In 1917 she met the rancher and entrepreneur Sebastian Mendiluce, twenty years her senior. Everyone was surprised when they announced their engagement, after only a few months. According to people who knew him at the time, Mendiluce thought little of literature in general and poetry in particular, had no artistic sensibility (although he did occasionally go to the opera), and his conversation was on a par with that of his farmhands and factory workers. He was tall and energetic, but not handsome by any standard. There was, however, no disputing his inexhaustible wealth.